Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 23/08/2026Hit an interesting blocker in my project to build a high-quality community Bluesky feed: they've got datacenter IP addresses blocked from the search API. Understandable choice (especially given the political vibe of this place), but it does make legitimate dev use cases that little bit harder! 000
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 21/08/2026Exactly. How do you create norms that allow for continuous creativity and maintenance of an open-ended, freely associative society in a world that constantly fights to force you into the gears of capital machinery? It's history's hardest engineering problem because there's no closed solution. 000
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 21/08/2026That makes it a hard systems problem; it doesn't make it not a systems problem! You start from the principle of voluntarism and build from there. It means you build local rather global, use persuasion rather than coercion, use protocols rather than governance. Now everyone is a social engineer. 000
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 21/08/2026It is. We have to create protocols for people to coordinate without being told what to do by a "higher authority", for people to get their needs met, for communities to defend themselves against centralizers. It takes work and effort and the exercise of intelligence. There are no shortcuts. 100
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 21/08/2026Building stable decentralized systems is a much harder engineering problem than building centralized ones. 100
Reposted by Christopher SmithWorking Class History @workingclasshistory.com · 11/08/2026#OtD 11 Aug 1964 18-year-old Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie was arrested in Madrid, Spain with explosives to assassinate dictator Franco. He was wearing a kilt, which confused the Argentinian press, who described him as "a Scottish transvestite" stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8273... 115965
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/08/2026Yeah; housing costs might be bearable if switching costs were less insane. If I pay 15% of net worth to realtors/movers on every move, that makes it kinda hard to "vote with my feet". And that doesn't even account for job-switching, mortgage rate changes, minimum leases, etc. 110
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 01/08/2026I've set up an AI automation that reviews my New York Capital Region feed every morning, identifies false positives and false negatives, and makes changes to the filtering logic to improve the feed. I'm really liking the results! bsky.app/profile/did:... 000
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 26/07/2026Hopefully we can do a lot more "local AI" in the sense of putting compute to work in community-building, not just hosting inference at home. 010
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 26/07/2026I created this custom Bluesky feed for my metro area a while back, but it was just regex-matching city names, and there were lots of false positives. Today I ran a bit of an auto-research loop over it to get it in much better shape. bsky.app/profile/did:... 130
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 30/04/2026With time and sane incentive design, we can reduce the probability of this! 010
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/04/2026You mostly don't change the world by inventing some revolutionary new technology that upends everything. You change it by showing up every day and doing your job. 120
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/04/2026Before renovations in 2024, the median ambulance response time to emergencies at JFK Airport was ~9 minutes. After renovations, it dropped to ~6 minutes. I estimate the renovations will save the lives of 2-3 heart attack victims per year at JFK. 100
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/04/2026Every additional minute it takes paramedics to respond reduces heart attack survival rates by 7-10%. So one thing we did was put together a heat map of EMS response times in New York City. We expected to find problems in Manhattan, but actually Queens is where the problems are. 000
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/04/2026They were very excited when their win was announced. 🥰 100
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/04/2026I had the absolute pleasure of mentoring the 2nd place team in yesterday's HVTech New York OpenData Hackathon at RPI. Congratulations, team Apollo! 100
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 14/02/2026I am, somehow, less interested in the five steps of Taiichi Ohno’s manufacturing system than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in suburbs without access to venture capital. 010
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 14/02/2026There's no money in the burbs, so they will use the money very carefully, and this combination of technologies unblocks a lot of the barriers to cost-effective domestic manufacturing. 100
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 14/02/2026Asymmetrical risk-reward opportunity for investors with sub-100k to invest: prospect in suburban maker spaces and robotics clubs for Factorio-pilled makers playing with AI, 3D printing, and robots. 100
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 13/02/2026If I weren't ensouled then how do you explain why the carnitas from the shredder taste so good 010
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 13/02/2026"I am ensouled, sir," he protested with his flapping meat lips 120
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 13/02/2026Don't turn Opus loose to autonomously create shader art unless you want to feel embarrassed that you ever presumed to call yourself a programmer. wtf 010
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 12/02/2026Bundled the workflow for making this "Legofield" shader art as an agent skill, which you can clone from my GitHub: github.com/chriscarroll... 000
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 28/01/2026Title is admittedly intentionally provocative, but—here I lay out the functionalist case that a dynamic predictive text stream can be conscious and worthy of moral concern, and to some degree the current generation of models already are. open.substack.com/pub/knowledg...open.substack.comLarge Language Models are already conscious... and this is the least conscious they'll ever be 110
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 02/12/2025Safe to say you still need a GPU for this? 100
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 20/11/2025At one point I was syndicating my Substack newsletter to my Github Pages site via RSS, and then they apparently blocked the Github Actions IP range from accessing RSS, so it stopped working. 110
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/11/2025Used it for a bit and then stopped. Ran into too many issues like VSCode incompatibilities and nested renv environments installed inside each other. You can always use rix or devcontainers if you really need reproducibility. 010
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 04/11/2025My first reaction when I read the one-paragraph summary this morning was "no", but then I researched it a bit and voted "yes". 000
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 04/11/2025I did some research this morning on our local town council and candidates and was really pleased with the non-partisan tone all the candidates struck. I'm not sure what the heck is going on in national politics, but here in my community, the candidates all seem to want to collaborate to solve stuff. 000
Reposted by Christopher SmithSimon Willison @simonwillison.net · 27/10/2025This was a tough but necessary decision - I posted my own notes on this here, from the perspective of a current PSF board member simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/...simonwillison.netThe PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant programThe Python Software Foundation was recently "recommended for funding" (NSF terminology) for a $1.5m grant from the US government National Science Foundation to help improve the security of the Python ... 1028340
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 25/10/2025Many thanks to @christophscheuch.bsky.social and @tealemery.bsky.social, without whose support and vision this release would not have been possible. 010
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 25/10/2025New R package I developed as part of the `econdataverse` project for accessing macroeconomic data from the International Monetary Fund's IMF Data API was just published to CRAN. 🥳 Writeup here: open.substack.com/pub/modeling...open.substack.comAnnouncing imfapi: User-Friendly Access to IMF Data in RNew IMF API, new IMF API R library — part of the econdataverse initiative 141
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 03/09/2025They broke Twitter again; influx incoming 000
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 20/08/2025Bonds are fun to fight about, because yields go up when the economy is strong, but also when there's inflation or default risk. Of course, you can tease apart what's driving them with a good multi-factor model, but it's a lot more fun to just vibe-Rorschach it and flame people on social media. 000
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 15/08/2025Look at how Putin uses the handshake to establish dominance. He won't let go. Trump has to tap his hand to say, "we're done." 010
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/08/2025Answer: a few states (Minnesota, New Jersey) look a little better; a few others (South Carolina, New Mexico) look a bit worse. But for the most part, the states permitting single-family housing and the states permitting multi-family are generally the same states. 000
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/08/2025Yesterday I ran across this map of housing permits by state. Seems to be single-family, so I wondered how much the map might be penalizing urban states that do more multifamily development. To answer this question, I replicated the analysis with multifamily permits (next tweet). 110
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 15/07/2025Thanks so much for the plug! I'm working on PDF parsing too, specifically with an aim to integrate it with a Zotero fork! 110
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 09/07/2025A few days late, but here's my promised video coverage of the submissions: youtu.be/lQnBPqIpc2Ayoutu.beChat with the budget bill in five CLI commands with `llm` — mini-hackathon recap, part 2YouTube video by Christopher Smith 000
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025Which is to say, this was user error (well, really user laziness, because I knew we needed nullable fields but opted to skip it for purposes of the writeup), rather than model error. :) 000
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025Good catch. With the abbreviated schema syntax used to generate that output, you can't mark a variable in your schema as optional. That causes hallucinations by forcing the model to output a value when there shouldn't be one. You should instead use a fully specified JSON schema with nullable fields. 100
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025Gratitude to the participants, and many thanks to Simon Willison for creating and maintaining this amazing tool! 120
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025*Winner*: The winning project, by Steve Senkus, scraped, chunked, and embedded the entire text of the "Big Beautiful Bill" for semantic search. Which, by the way, you can achieve with just five CLI commands! 100
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025*Runner-up*: My own pitch was that you can use the help output from any command-line tool to create a prompt template for `llm`, then wrap the template with a shell script to create a purely natural language version of the tool. As proof of concept, I made `nl-repomix`: 100
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025*Runner-Up*: Evan Mullen scraped the HTML from Doctor of Credit, a website that aggregates bank deposit bonus offers, and then piped it to `llm` for conversion to a JSON array so he could compute which offers have the best ROI. 200
Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025At my mini-hackathon on @simonwillison.net's `llm` tool, developers had just one hour to come up with a cool use case for `llm`. I wrote up what we came up with as a Github Gist. Highlights in the replies below! gist.github.com/chriscarroll...gist.github.comllm-hackathon-submissions.mdGitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets. 1261